How To Reduce Web Hosting Bandwidth

Copyright 2002 Herman Drost

You just received a higher than normal monthly bill on yourcredit card for web hosting. Your hosting company explainsthat you exceeded your monthly minimum for “bandwidthusage” and suggests reducing the size of your web sitefiles.

What is bandwidth usage?
What does bandwidth mean?
How much bandwidth do you need?
How can you reduce bandwidth usage?

Let’s discuss each of these topics in more depth.

What is “bandwidth usage?”
This refers to the total amount of information that has beenserved to your web site visitors each month. Every file on your Web Site has a specific size (e.g. 22K). Every time a visitor downloads that file, your bandwidth usage goes up by that amount.

The larger the file, the higher the bandwidth usage whenit is downloaded. The more traffic to your site, the more bandwidth you will use.

What does “bandwidth” mean?
Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. The “data transfer rate” is the speedwith which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and Mbps, respectively.

Bits and Bytes
8 bits = 1 byte.
1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (Kb).
1,024 kilobytes (Kb) = 1 megabyte (mb or meg)
1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (gb or gig)

How much bandwidth do I need?
To determine how much bandwidth you need, estimate thefile size of each web page, and then multiply it by the numberof pages on your web site.

Multiply this figure by the number of the number of pageviews you expect per month from your site.

For example, if your web page consists of two 15Kb imagesand 3Kb of html, you would have 33Kb of data for thatpage. Now multiply this by the number of page views youexpect to have per month (e.g. 100,000 per month). Thiswould mean 3.3Gb of data needs to be transferred per monthfor that page.

Now recalculate this number for each page, and you’ll know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.

How can you reduce bandwidth usage?
The easy way is to reduce the size of the files on your site, particularly images and other graphics. For example, you havea large image (i.e. 200KB) on your web page that is downloadedby each visitor every time the page is requested. If youreduce this image to 20KB or remove it altogether, it willdramatically cut your bandwidth usage. It will also speedup your site’s performance.

For more information on optimizing images for the Web, readmy article, “Preparing Images for Your Web Site”,

Web Sites that have MP3s to download, movies, music playingin the background and large images, will obviously have ahigher bandwidth. Large web sites or sites that expect alot of traffic, will also use a lot.

If your site has mainly html pages and small images, your bandwidth will not be that high.

Bandwidth Tools
Monitoring bandwidth
http://www.utoronto.ca/ucres/netup.htm

Web Page Checker
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/page_size.cgi

Tuning up your Web Site
http://websitegarage.netscape.com/

Bandwidth Tips
If you make changes to your site by addingmore files and/or web pages, recalculate your web sitefile size.

Estimate how many visitors will be accessing your web pagesover the next few months.

Recalculate the bandwidth usage for your site. You may needmore web space and bandwidth for your site to function effectively.

Check with your web hosting company to upgrade yourhosting plan.

Conclusion
Now you can avoid the shock of exceeding yourmonthly bandwidth usage and paying higher hosting fees.
You are now ready to receive more traffic to your site andtherefore make more sales.

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Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)o
wner and author of iSiteBuild.com
Low Cost Hosting and Site Design

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